


Ages Gone

by K_promises_fall



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Future, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Gen, POV Second Person, everyone died a long time ago
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-03
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-07-29 04:00:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7669309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/K_promises_fall/pseuds/K_promises_fall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The years pass, and still Weiss marches on. And on. And on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. +100 years approx.

Your name is Weiss Schnee. Once, that meant something. A lifetime ago you meant something – to someone, to multiple someones. Now all you are is a relic of a time long since passed, lingering beyond your natural limit.

The world has changed: wilder, untamed, with smaller settlements surrounding massive space ports – the final strongholds for the few who chose to remain on Remnant with the ever growing grimm population. They are a curious type of people. Brave enough to stay, too scared to leave. Determined to survive, but stubborn enough to doom themselves to death with the last of their cities. They send their children to the moon, just in case, but refuse to retreat for themselves.

They linger, like you do, desperation clinging to a past long since lost. They don’t rely on dust anymore, like you do. They no longer have the manpower or resources to mine and process it. When the Schnee Dust Corporation fell all those years ago, the dust processing industry was lost with it. When Atlas was lost days later, all major stockpiles of dust were lost with that.

You still have access though. You cycle through the remaining settlements, battling grimm as you go, and at the end you return always to the Atlasian emergency dust stores. It is what has kept you alive thus far. You eat the dust and you survive. You eat the dust and you put some in your pack – in Ruby’s pack, and then you move on.

Your name is Weiss Schnee. Once, that meant something. Now you are a ghost, left behind by people only you remember. Three foolish girls who fought for things like hope, and peace, and more time – always just a little more time. You have one promise to keep: survive. You have one purpose: defend. You travel between settlements and do both.

It’s what they wanted.

Your name is Weiss Schnee. You tell yourself so you remember. You’re the only one who can.


	2. + 500 years approx.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Weiss (what's left of her) continues on. And on. And on. And on.

Markus swung his naginata, slicing open the neck of an ursa before leaping back, away from the swipe of the beowolf that moved to take its place. His chase partner, Edna, jumped down from one of the branches above him, diverting a slash with one of her axes while the other severed the beowolf’s leg. Taking the opportunity, Markus dashed in with a downward sweep of his blade. There was a millisecond of resistance as he hit the hardened mask of the grimm, before it gave way and allowed the blade to pass through.

When he looked away from the dissolving grimm, Edna was already moving away, cutting through thin branches and vines in her path. He quickly moved to follow.

They had been at this for almost four hours now, soon it would be time to return to base and switch out with a fresh team. If he made it back, this would be his second successful deployment. He’d practically be a veteran. His radio started crackling, and he removed it from his belt to better hear the incoming message.

“All teams, check in.”

Immediately, responses started coming through. “DRA, here.” “DTY, here.” “DTT, here, Captain.” There was a pause after that and he took the moment to hold down the transmission button on his radio and quickly said, “DEM, here.” Then he waited.

And waited. Ahead of him, Edna slowed her pace slightly, the only indication she gave that she was listening to her own radio.

“DVA, here. Arrow is down, requesting permission to return to base.”

“Granted,” the Captain responded. “DCB, check in.” Silence. Markus’ heart sank. “All teams, rendezvous in ten.”

Various calls of affirmative came through the radio, Markus added his own before replacing the device to the clip on his belt. He didn’t know much about Bryan of team CB, but Coco had been a descendant of an old war hero of the same name. This was her fifth deployment. Losing someone who had made it past their third deployment was always hard, but losing Coco was worse. No one had said it out loud, but her name and the fact that she continued to survive had been a source of hope for many of them.

Suddenly, Edna stopped. When he came to a stop beside her, she turned to look at him, eyebrow raised. “Do you hear that?”

He tensed, suddenly alert and straining his ears for any unusual sounds. He’d kick himself if he could, getting lost in thought while chasing was a death sentence, and he’d still been foolish enough to do it. Once he was actually paying attention, he heard what Edna was probably hearing. Fighting sounds. He looked into confused eyes.

“Are we close to DTY’s chase zone?”

“No,” she replied. Then she looked away, her eyebrows furrowed. “We’re investigating, stick to the trees. Watch your surroundings and make sure you’re not seen.”

“Understood.”

She nodded once at him then took to climbing the nearest sturdy tree she could find. He followed, partially retracting the pole of his naginata so it didn’t get tied up in vines as they moved. He traced Edna’s path through the trees exactly as she cut away branches and vines, moving slowly to make as little noise as possible. At three minutes to the rendezvous time, they finally found the source of noise.

Edna slowly pushed a small branch out of her view, before gasping softly, “It’s real.”

“What’s real?” he asked. Edna just motioned him forward. When he looked through the gap she had made in the leaves his breath caught in his throat. “Holy hell, what is that?”

The creature below was fighting a boarbatusk. A trail of black ash marked a path through the forest across from them, with trampled bushes and broken branches showing where it had fought its way through to the small clearing below. As he watched, the boarbatusk charged, ramming into the crystal figure. It barely budged. One arm-like appendage grasped a tusk, lifting the grimm and slamming it back down onto its back. Before the grimm could react it stabbed the boarbatusk through the stomach with the thin blade that made up its other “arm”. The grimm caught fire, screaming weakly before dissolving to ash.

The other creature pulled its blade from the ground and then lumbered over to a bundle of red cloth, a pack he soon realised. As it grasped the makeshift strap and put it on its back in eerily human-like movements, the jagged crystals on its skin retracted until they were smooth. The arm with the blade – and he could make it out as a sword now, a kind of rapier maybe – was smaller and thinner than the other, the blade stuck in the crystals and dragging along the ground as the creature moved. Its head was a smooth canvas of white. He couldn’t make out any eyes, if there were any. He didn’t see a nose either. There was a mouth though – the white crystal carapace bordering blue lips and what might have once been a human jaw.

With its bag settled onto its back, the creature turned to continue its path through the forest, passing under them with steps that didn’t care for stealth. He and Edna watched it until it disappeared, then looked at each other.

“What-” his voice cracked, and he swallowed, coughing lightly to clear his throat before trying again. “What was that thing? Was that a grimm?”

Edna’s eyes were open wide. She looked afraid, but also awed. He had to strain his ears to hear her answer, whispered with reverence.

“The Spirit of Remnant. It’s real.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so very sorry.


	3. +800 year approx.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Unfortunately, Weiss continues on.

Atla clutches her rifle with sweaty hands, achingly conscious of the distance of her fingers from the trigger. She’s been posted in an empty office on the ninth floor of Geralt and Co., the administrative office of a beverage making company that is popular here in her home city of New Atlas, but isn’t as popular in the rest of the country. Funnily enough it’s the building where her father used to work. His work space had been on the fourth floor and she remembers long afternoons spent in his mesh office chair, playing games on his computer as he was bent over document cards and electronic bits.

The ninth floor hadn’t even existed to her back then. Just like grimm hadn’t existed. The ninth floor had been something distant and irrelevant; barely even part of her reality. The grimm had been the same. Creatures of the past. Legends. Nightmarish tales that were probably just exaggerations colouring over the real story.

Now she was stationed on that non-existent ninth floor, wearing full armour over her military action suit for the first time since basic training, preparing to fight against monsters so long extinct they were thought to have never existed in the first place.

She’s never been this terrified.

A sudden rumbling grabs her attention and she looks northward, watching as a building she recognises as the Tax Administration District Headquarters disappears from the skyline, its sinking structure soon obscured by a rising cloud of dust and smoke from nearby fires. The ground and walls shake slightly as she loses sight of it. Then everything is still again, laser cannons firing in the distance and the sirens of firetrucks the only sounds that reach her from the disaster striking at her city.

The building was only seven blocks away from where she was now, and she sends a silent prayer for her brother, out fighting fires even as around him soldiers fight against an encroaching army of children’s nightmares.

Below her, at the entrance to the square, the rest of her squadron has formed a firing line behind a steel reinforced cement barrier. They are the second to last line of defence. If the grimm make it this far – when the grimm make it this far, there will be nothing left for those remaining in New Atlas but a swift retreat and a final evacuation as the last line delays the grimm for as long as possible. New Atlas will be the first city to fall since The Repopulation two centuries ago. The thought leaves the taste of ash on her tongue and has her heart beating thunderously loud in her ears. She’s shaking.

Atla closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, releases it, repeats the motion. Rubs her tongue over her teeth to generate spit and swallows it down to ease her dry throat. When she isn’t shaking anymore, she reopens her eyes. An explosion – still some distance away but closer than the others – causes the building to shake lightly, and she hears the clatter of something falling to the ground behind her. She ignores it, wiping her hands in a rag she returns to a pocket on her vest and resettling the rifle on the windowsill, peering through the scope down her assigned street.

She’s focused, waiting.

Her first shot isn’t aimed at the street below, but at a bird-like grimm she almost doesn’t spot in time. It’s flying east, away from the barricade and further into the city. She shoots once, twice, and it doesn’t die but it does fall to the ground below where someone else finishes it off. She quickly scans the sky for any others, but finds none. The anti-air defences are still holding up, it seems. Relieved, she returns to her assigned street and continues waiting. The next grimm she sees is a wolf like creature, bounding forward in powerful leaps, knocking aside the abandoned cars set up as blockades as it goes. She doesn’t get the chance to shoot as it’s peppered with automatic fire from the second floor of two buildings along that road before it gets very far. Then more come, and Atla is firing shots and reloading in a constant rhythm as the number of grimm swells.

Ash builds up in the road as grimm disintegrate, and is scattered by the incoming horde. They don’t all stick to the road, some crash through windows and walls and attempt to climb the buildings to get at the soldiers hidden inside.

They haven’t reached the barricade yet, but the cannons there are firing steadily, and she hears them, a high pitched whine as they power up and a rough fwoomph as they fire short beams of light and dust at the grimm. She hears them, but doesn’t see them, too focused on picking off as many grimm as she can. 

She’s not watching the barricade. So she doesn’t see the trained soldiers breaking line and scrambling out of the way of the lumbering crystal statue that was New Atlas’ main tourist attraction as it climbs over the concrete barricade and drops to the street below. She doesn’t notice it until the panicked chatter over the comm line grabs her attention and she does a sweep with her rifle of the nearby streets, wondering if grimm had somehow made it past the blockades they made. There’s nothing, the grimm seeming to prefer the path of least resistance and with more people, to empty streets laden with traps and barriers and automated firing systems. 

It’s on her sweep back that she sees it, and her finger twitches on the trigger reflexively. The bullet hits the mark, but doesn’t seem to cause even a dent. It’s when she’s about to pull the trigger a second time that she finally realises what it is that she’s looking at.

New Atlas is a fairly young city, only 83 years old. It was the first settlement to be built up on land that records state had previously been part of the kingdom of Atlas, and was named after it as a result. The interesting thing about New Atlas was that it had originally been founded about forty miles southwest of where it currently stood, close to a large but surprisingly shallow dust deposit that the original settlers had planned to mine and trade to other cities where it could be processed.

Six months after the first buildings went up and the mining operation was started, adventurers or terrain mappers or travelling merchants – the story couldn’t decide which – came across something spectacular. A statue, made entirely out of dust crystals; pure white and intriguingly smooth, with no visible marks to indicate that it had somehow been carved by human hands. It was humanoid in shape, with identifiable arms and legs and a head, but beast-like in features, the arms disproportionate and a mouth carved onto a head with no eyes or ears or nose. From its left arm a blade made of ice dust crystal protruded, its surface thin and smooth and translucent enough to see the remains of some ancient rapier at its centre. The tip of the blade had been embedded in the ground below.

For whatever reason, those original settlers had decided that the statue perfectly embodied the spirit of their new dust-rich home, and had moved the centre of their fledgling town the forty miles to where the statue stood, afraid that attempting to move it would damage it in some way.

The town eventually became a city, and the statue had remained at its centre as the original buildings were bulldozed and replaced with larger, more modern commercial buildings, and a small water jet themed park was built up around the statue to make up the city square.

Atla had grown up around the statue, and had long since grown disenchanted with its crystal shine and deformed appearance. It had become practically invisible to her, just another part of the same city she had been seeing every day since she had been born. She’d hardly even spared a thought for it outside of exasperation at the political fuss that had amounted when the military had told city officials that there wasn’t time to safely move the statue to a location outside the newly declared warzone.

It was a statue. Just a statue. A fairly ugly one too, despite its shine. That’s what she had thought anyway, but now she’s watching through her scope, jaw dropped, as the statue steadily makes its way down the street overrun with grimm, glowing red then green then yellow then white again and all other sorts of colours – dust colours she realises in a half formed thought.

As it walks – slowly, steadily – it kills grimm; crystal surface extending in spikes, crushing, piercing and slicing grimm as it goes; setting some of them on fire and freezing others. One grimm climbs up the face of a building in an attempt to get behind it and the sword arm swings out, stretching until it is razor thin, to pierce the grimm through the back and slam it down to the ground hard enough for a cloud of dust to rise, cracks forming in the street.

There are orders coming through her earpiece, to keep firing at the grimm, to kill whatever gets by the statue, but Atla doesn’t register them until the gunfire below picks up again. She hadn’t even noticed the shooting had stopped.

Forcing her mind clear, Atla does her best to reclaim that place her mind had been before. The streets below are now under control, so she instead sets her sights on the rooftops, where a few grimm have sought refuge from the carnage. She lines up her shot and takes it, and tries not to think about what is happening on the street below.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive me. (I'm not sorry)

**Author's Note:**

> I am so sorry. (So sorry)
> 
> This is part of my 2016 writing project on [ my tumblr](http://shyro-vindan.tumblr.com/2016-writing-project).


End file.
